Some powerful messages from behind prison bars

April 13, 2003|By Chesa Boudin. Chesa Boudin is a Rhodes scholar-elect in his senior year at Yale University and is active in criminal-justice reform as a student organizer and lecturer.

Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies From Our Imprisoned Sisters

By Wally Lamb and the women of York Correctional Institution

ReganBooks/HarperCollins, 350 pages, $24.95

Anyone who has ever been incarcerated or otherwise spent time around prisons knows that inmates are hardly society's most eloquent, articulate group--even on the rare occasions they are given a chance to make themselves heard.

Take a representative group of undereducated female felons (most of whom faced sexual or other physical abuse during childhood) confined in a maximum-security state prison where they are further dehumanized and humiliated by other inmates and prison officials, and then try to help them become accomplished writers--that was the challenge Wally Lamb faced when he began volunteering at Connecticut's York Correctional Institution.

Lamb began volunteering in the wake of a string of suicides that left the prison's staff frantic to give the inmates a way to combat their despair. For a group of these women, writing turned out to be just the thing.

Over the course of several years, Lamb and a full-time teacher at the York Correctional Institution school, Dale Griffith, ran a writing workshop with a group of inmates. The intimacy of the group gave the women the support and trust they needed to dig up, reflect on and ultimately share with the world some of their most dreaded memories. The expertise and dedication of the group's teachers provided the women with the tools for becoming strong writers. Through the writing workshop, Lamb helped each of the 11 participants find her own unique voice, a testament to the high quality of the teaching.

Out of that workshop has come "Couldn't Keep It to Myself," a collection of essays by women whose backgrounds are as diverse as their crimes, but through their writing they call out with one voice. Unpretentious and with easy-to-read prose, this book is hard to put down from the very beginning. The writing is subtle, but the message is clear: Prisoners are human beings, with unique talents as well as unique flaws. As Griffith writes in the concluding chapter, "My students' treasures are buried under piles of emotional and institutional rubble--yet the treasures are there, waiting to be unearthed and discovered."

While a book could never fully convey the reality of a lengthy incarceration, through skillful writing, creative technique and sheer narrative urgency these essays convey a powerful message, showing the universal human traits we all share with prisoners and their ability to change. In her essay, "Christmas in Prison," Robin Cullen traces the deterioration of prison conditions over her 8-year sentence for second-degree manslaughter with a motor vehicle:

"When the trumpet of the jubilee sounds on the day of atonement, the Old Testament promises, liberty will be proclaimed and every man shall be returned to his family. . . . Pope John Paul has proclaimed 2000 the Jubilee Year. At York C.I., however, no one's gotten the message. The [Christmas] trees have disappeared, the roast beef dinner's endangered, and the `presents' have been held up until the backup of money orders gets unclogged. We can't get out and Christmas is no longer allowed in. This is a maximum-security facility."

In prison, too, little things make a big difference, and the loss of plastic decorative Christmas trees around the facility that year was deeply felt by inmates such as Cullen.

In another essay, Bonnie Foreshaw, an inmate of Jamaican descent serving 45 years for homicide, remembers the pleasures of life before her arrest:

"Up and down the street, the neighbors' music sang about life's joys and sufferations, God's goodness, and the highs and lows of love. . . .

"The music's in you, part of your culture, a chunk of who you are.

"And hallelujah, God gave us noses and taste buds along with ears and feet. . . . At holiday times, my extended family knew whose house to come to when they wanted to eat, drink, and celebrate life. . . .

"And always, always, we ate to the soundtrack of laughter, talk, and music."

The utter humanness of these women's cherished memories and their reliance on them during hard times sends a much-needed message that no one should be defined by her worst mistake.

Still, the darker side of these women's pre-arrest lives is an ominous and unforgettable theme throughout. In "Snapshots of My Early Life," Diane Bartholomew, a picky eater as a child, describes the nightly dinner ritual when her mother was working a second-shift job and her father was left "in charge":